


only if for a night

by thegirl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Everyone is Dead, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Spirits, halloween fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5118875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirl/pseuds/thegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On All Hallows Eve, the veil between the realm of the dead and the land of the living is said to be at it's thinnest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only if for a night

**Author's Note:**

> GOT THIS IN 4 MINS BEFORE MIDNIGHT SO IT STILL COUNTS AS A HALLOWEEN FIC. BOOM.

Jon is cold. Jon is always cold. Jon is ice, bone, chalk and fire, and the sound blood makes when it makes cobblestones all slick and warm and throbbing, and most damning of all, Jon is dead. Jon is dead. Jon is dead. Jon is going to be dead forever, and ever, and ever.

And then, suddenly, Jon is less dead.

He is not alive again – nothing can make him alive again, as he once was, but he has a solid stream of thought, a purpose, two feet to carry him and sight and an almost body, and it’s enough. If only for a night.

Jon doesn’t know where he’s going as he crosses countries, seas, harbours and cities, but he ends up next to Arya anyhow, even if she doesn’t look like his Arya anymore. His soul knows her soul, and as she shifts in her sleep, her brow creased, Jon reaches out with his almost hand and smooths out her bird’s nest hair.

 _Little sister,_ he tries to say with his phantom throat and lungs and tongue, but he is dead and speech and sound are for the living. Jon is a ghost now, as mute as his wolf.

 

What is left of Catelyn Stark does not rest. She does not sleep, she does not dream, she does not feel fatigue or tiredness or weariness. Lady Stoneheart sits as still as a statue, with a rod straight back, as her companions slumber. Her breaths barely make any sound at all in the night.

 _They are so weak,_ she thinks, when she can think further than blood and pain and red and death. _They are so human and so fallible and so mortal._ She does not remember mortality – she just remembers how the end felt – the fear and the desperation and the agony and her son’s face as he fell to the ground, all the blood leeching from his cheeks.

There is no warmth left on earth for her – she remembers, sometimes, barely, the day that the crown she clings to was forged and almost immediately placed on her son’s russet curls – still warm to the touch it was so fresh from the forge. Her sons were her warmth, and her daughters her sunlight, and her husband her life, and she has lost them all.

It is a dark world for her now, and no matter how many traitors she hangs, the light does not come back. Her family do not come back. She is alone.

Except, sometimes, on one night of the year, she almost sleeps. She almost dreams. She closes her eyes for a moment and her husband is running his gentle hand through her hair, her sons are playing at her feet, her daughters sitting either side of her, and Catelyn Stark becomes almost alive again.

 

There was one night of the year that Lord Tywin Lannister would receive no visitors. There would be no meetings or appointments or even whores sneaking through the secret passageways. No one but him knew why.

It begun the year after Tyrion was born, and his wife died. He had never considered remarrying, though it was a good political move. His heart, he decided, had imprinted on Joanna and now she was gone it refused to let her go. The very thought of her brought him both terrible pain and terrible ecstasy at once.

And no more so than on All Hallows Eve.

 _Are you here_ , he will ask an empty room, and the candles will flicker and the windowpanes will rattle and Tywin will smile, where no one but she can see.

Tywin knows Joanna in death, in misery, at the end of the world. _I have missed you,_ he tells her every year, and he hears her laugh carried by the wind.

 

 _Elia,_ Oberyn will say before her grave, _I am sorry. I will kill them all. I am sorry. I'll make them pay. I am sorry. I love you._

But Oberyn is hot blooded, and does not wait around for dead girls to answer back when he thinks he knows the course to take. Maybe, if he had, it would have been a different story.

 

Rickon doesn’t like sleeping alone in the castle.

He knows it is where he was born, more a home of his than Skagos ever was, safer and stronger and newer and sturdier, but reason does not enter into it.

The boy had felt safer in a hut than he did in his feather bed.

So he sneaks every night to Osha’s rooms, until the servants begin to expect his silhouette to come creeping down the hallways in the dead of night, and the guards know where he’ll wake in the morning.

That’s why it came as such a surprise when Osha woke up one morning alone, as she had been when she fell asleep.

 _Did you not feel scared?_ She asks Rickon later, and the boy shook his head.

 _My father and brother protected me,_ he told her chirpily. Osha smiled, and ruffled his hair, and hoped the dreams of his dead family kept him safe for a little longer against the horrors of the world.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please leave kudos and review!


End file.
